me and Erin in cool shirts!

 JACK WHITE IS 6'2"???? I thought he was 5'5". This changes everything

in West Virginia!

I went climbing with my sister at the New River Gorge!

Surprise trip that I found out about a day before I went but it was so great!

Second time leading outdoors and put up a 5.10A that I onsighted! Dying for a Living. It was awesome.

Worked on a short 5.10C called Essence that was super fun but I was crazy pumped for the short roof section at the end. Would love to come back again and give it a proper try with some specific training. Very fun.

I love thinking about the New River Gorge. Just an endless amount of climbs. It feels like you could move there and climb every day and never run out of things to do. Really glad my sister has such great friends and invited me!

and now for something completely different

 There's this guy I watch on YouTube name Greg Guevara and he's like a performance artist who goes really deeply into the ideas behind internet culture and the kinds of personalities that develop from being chronically online. And so for a long time he was kind of out there as this guy who was like really really down deep into the muck of the internet but could still speak about it in a semi-coherent way. Lately though he's made this switch to being someone who has come out the other end of everything and now he talks a lot about how much he values community and genuine social interaction and healthy friendships and he made this video about 'irony poisoning' and there's this section in it that I really like and think about whenever I make a social mistake or do something awkward:

"and I have felt and will feel absolutely all the problems that community comes with like broken trust and heartbreak. I will feel betrayal. I'm sure I will inflict plenty of pain upon of plenty of people just as they inflict pain upon me. That's how human interactions work. When did we forget that that was a part of it? Finding community will not solve your problems it'll just make your problems more bearable and it will also give you better problems. I want you to have those problems. Those are good problems. I don't feel purposeless and nihilistic and confused and to the extent that I do still feel all of those things--they're way more of just like passing thoughts and emotions rather than my actual baseline egoistic state."

inhibitions and athletic performance

 Back in March I started focusing on ways I could become more athletic and faster and that very quickly led me to this guy Tony Holler and the Feed the Cats program. Pretty much the only thing Feed the Cats does besides sprinting is something called 'x-factor' which is a whole smorgasbord of high intensity athletic movements. Jumping, bounding, lateral movements, etc. The basic idea is to do things that fast people do well and that slow people do poorly and try to get better at them. Immediately I saw a connection to climbing because climbing is almost nothing but an endless variety of novel high intensity movements. 

So I've been incorporating this movement practice which got me thinking about the ways that athletes inhibit their movement. The psychological definition of an inhibition is a voluntary or involuntary restraint on the direct expression of an instinct." And I think it's a much better word than saying someone is too scared or too lazy or too incompetent. It acknowledges that we all have these internal speed limits and warning signs and through conscious practice we can get closer to our full potential. 

It's common in climbing to encounter moves where you're flinging yourself through the air towards a wall and you have to generate enough momentum to get your body to the wall to be able to grab onto a hold. 99% of people will stop their momentum or intentionally undershoot for a hold to try to keep themselves safe. Often they'll reach for the target hold but leave the rest of their body as far away from the wall as possible. You can see that braking system kick in so clearly when you watch people try to jump to something. And then most people will gradually kind of feel it out and build confidence by inching closer and closer with each attempt so they override that safety system. Anyway one of the first things I did to try to work on movement and inhibition was set up a gym mat on pads and say 'I want you to tackle this mat as hard as possible.' I wanted them to get more comfortable with moving their body very fast through space towards something. 

Growing up I can remember thinking to myself in high school that I was a really inhibited person. I didn't use that word but I very vividly remember making a connection between being slow and the fact that I was uncomfortable with things like taking my shirt off at practice and getting on roller-coasters and generally shy. The really fast guys on the team carried themselves in a way and did things that showed they had a much broader comfort zone. I'm not saying there is a 1:1 correlation between social anxiety and performance but I do think it makes sense to think that if you have a pretty inhibited personality that you're going to struggle to push yourself really hard. A quality of high level athletic performance is that it looks unrestrained. 

One issue we're running into now as we try to improve general athleticism off the climbing wall is that the kids are slow to trust training that doesn't look like climbing. So they'll say, "that's dumb. I'm not doing that." or they feel embarrassed or they go through the motions of the exercise but they're just kind of checking the box (I was very much this person as an athlete. I'll do what I'm told to do but in the back of my mind I was like 'can't we just go run?' The one thing I did basically outright refuse was the weight room because I was very self-conscious in there)

I can understand why if you're someone who really loves climbing and wants to get better at it that you would be skeptical of crawling around on mats and turning your body in all sorts of weird ways. I get that the connection between rotating your body on the ground and movement on the wall isn't immediately apparent. It's going to take time and convincing and ultimately it's going to take successful examples to really get buy-in. My big goal this year is to find ways to connect the two and make that more salient.

The last thing I'll say is that at the younger level and those who are newer climbing: they love doing off the wall movement practice. I think some of them would be happy to do an entire practice of rolling and crawling and jumping on the mats. My guess is that a lot of them are at a developmental stage where that movement practice is really relevant and they're less invested in climbing and they don't have the grip strength and their hands start to hurt about 30 minutes into practice so getting to move around without holding onto something is a welcomed break. 

Inhibitions. Interesting stuff.

some animals that I admire and why

 ants: I've had a long-held belief that ants are masters of teamwork. You ever watch a group of ants pick up something and carry it together? The sheer cohesiveness! I wish I could sip on an ounce of what ants got going on. For the queen. For the colony.

ducks: On a rainy day, it's a good day to be a duck. On a dry day, it's still a good day to be a duck. Ducks are the masters of multiple elements. Air. Water. Earth. And the wield all this power without falling into the temptation of becoming awful snake-headed beasts like the ignominious goose. This speaks to their character and love of good.

squirrels: turtles and snails get a lot of credit for having their homes on their backs but the squirrel tail is like carrying a sleeping bag that also gives you insane agility. I just think squirrels are neat little guys.

moths: I like that moths are like butterflies except they decide to worship the moon, be fluffy and feathery, and eat people's wool jackets to survive. Those are some bold artistic choices. Ooooh I'm a butterfly I like being colorful and drinking from beautiful flowers. Nah, be villainous and weird.

So my values based on these choices are teamwork, be good at everything you do but don't let it corrupt you, stay cozy but also nimble, and make iconic choices.

There are worse things to live by.

something I live for

making regular people at the gym laugh at the banter I have with the kids I coach.

I made one guy laugh a couple times at the conversations I was having. good stuff. I feel unbreakable. Made of light and magic.

 I reckon it's good to make things simple. Do simple things well. Know simple things well. You'll go along okay.